Psychologists have often spoken or written about what is called “the fight or flight phenomenon.” It is something that applies with as much validity to animals as to humans. For example, suppose the biggest lion on the Serengeti Plain in Africa has brought down a nice plump gazelle all by himself. I don’t know whether a single lion, no matter how fast and strong, could catch a gazelle. But let’s say the gazelle had stopped to drink from a small water hole in the desert, and she wasn’t watching what she was doing while she was slaking her fierce thirst, and wham! the lion grabbed her from behind before she even knew what hit her.
Suppose further that a fairly large covey of lions, a whole herd of lions, a powerful pride of lions, happened upon the first lion as he was nicely into his feast of sushi gazelle. Suddenly he is faced with a dilemma: should it be fight or flight? Should he try to protect his kill be taking on all comers, or would it be more prudent to say to them, “All right, you dirty rats, I can’t defeat the whole platoon of you, so here is my gazelle, and I now shall retreat from what otherwise might have been the field of battle.” Most solitary lions, even the biggest ones around, would choose flight over fight, when the odds are stacked so heavily against them.
Now let us hypothesize the “fight or flight” phenomenon for human beings. Imagine that you find yourself in a run-down section of Savannah, Georgia at 11:00 PM on a dark night in July. Your car ran out of gas a few streets back, and you’re walking to find a 24-hour convenience store that sells gasoline. As you turn a corner, you see a large menacing-looking group of teenage boys, who, at the same moment, see you. You are a proper South Carolinian, which means you are packing a 9 mm. Glock semi-automatic pistol with a nine shot clip inside your loose-fitting lightweight hoodie. (Don’t tell me you never pack heat and you never wear a hoodie; just be a good sport and go along with the story here.) What do you do: a) turn back around the corner, and start walking as fast as you can, b) walk up to these menacing-looking probable serial killers and ask for directions to the closest gas station, c) silently keep going the way you were going, saying nothing, and hoping for the best, or d) pull out your Glock and either keep going or slowly retreat from whence you just came?
Fight or flight never works out like that. The example, while barely plausible, is too contrived. But you get the idea of what I am driving at.
Here is a much more believable scenario. You have a neighbor or son or daughter or sister or brother who drives you to distraction. You have always managed to avoid confrontation with this person, because you felt it wouldn’t be worth it to lock horns. But he/she finally does something so outrageous, so in-your-face, that you want to scream. Do you draw a line in the sand, or do you walk away, again, as you have always done previously?
Or suppose you have – or once had – a boss who was regularly unfair to you and everyone else in the office. When he berated you unfairly for the umpteenth time, do you finally take your stand and give him a whalloping what-for, letting the chips fall where they may, including the possibility of losing your job, or do you try to get out of the confrontation, as painful as that choice also may be? Which is it: fight or flight?
Whoever wrote the seventy or so Psalms which are ascribed to King David, whether or not it was actually David, that person surely must have had a Ph.d. in clinical psychology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His insights about the human mind and his observations regarding human behavior are sufficiently astute as to warrant other doctoral theses to be defended by other doctoral students of clinical psychology on bits and pieces of what he wrote.
David, or whoever wrote the Psalms of David, had a very complex and even convoluted psyche himself. He had a unique penchant for making enemies. Reading the biography of David in I and II Samuel, it is easy to believe it was the actual king who wrote the Psalms which the Book of Psalms says he wrote, because the biographical David managed to alienate nearly everyone in his own family and in his entire kingdom. Probably he needed to have his head shrunk to try to figure out why he did that, but that isn’t what this sermon is about. What this sermon is about is this: What do we do when flight seems to trump fight? What should be a proper response when our inclination is to run away from our problems as fast and as far as we can? Ought we to surrender to the temptation to avoid controversy at all costs when it confronts us, and simply flee for safety? Or should we stay and face the music, fighting as best we can?
I have just read Stephen Ambrose’s history of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It is called Undaunted Courage. It is the account of one of the most astonishing and inspiring chapters in American history. It is little less than miraculous that this small group of carefully selected soldiers under the leadership of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark managed to go all the way up the Missouri River to its headwaters, and then over the Bitterroot Mountains in what is now western Montana, and then down the Columbia River to the Pacific. The obstacles they faced were enormous, and the potentials for disaster were endless. Yet they made it out and back, and they gave Thomas Jefferson and the young nation the first educated summary of what a spectacular bargain had been struck with the Louisiana Purchase for a mere fifteen million dollars, which today might be fifteen billion, and still be a huge bargain. Thank heaven Napoleon needed money to fight his many wars, or we might be a third the size country we are.
One of the persistent threats against the success of the expedition was the uncertainty of what various Indians might do when they encountered the white explorers. In one particular episode, some Sioux Indians in what now is South Dakota threatened to stop the explorers’ boats as they went upriver. By sign language Lewis and Clark told the Indians to release the lines to the boats. When they didn’t, he turned their guns, including a swivel gun loaded with buckshot, at the natives. Finally one of the Sioux braves convinced the others to back off, and bloodshed was averted. Had they fired on the Indians, the explorers certainly would soon all have been killed, and the whole plan would have been aborted, because there were a several hundred Sioux, armed with bows and arrows and a few with firearms. It was neither fight nor flight for either side, but a tense retreat for both the American soldiers and the Indian braves.
When you’re down and out
When you’re on the street
When evening falls so hard
I will comfort you
I’ll take your part
When darkness comes
And pain is all around
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.
What did Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel mean when they wrote the lyrics to and sang that song? When you’re down and out, who will comfort you? When is it that darkness and pain come to us all? And who is the bridge over troubled water? Very deliberately Simon and Garfunkle don’t tell us, and we are left to decide the answers for ourselves.
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a song for people who find themselves in situations where flight trumps fight, where they feel they can’t make it on their own, and they know they can’t successfully fight whatever it is that plagues them. Psalm 55 says, “My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yea, I would wander afar, I would lodge in the wilderness, I would haste to find me a shelter from the raging wind and tempest” (55:4-8).
I just read that throughout the Great Plains of the USA, thousands of small towns and villages have passed out of existence over the past two generations. In Kansas alone, more than 6000 towns have vanished altogether, and almost nothing is left to show where these places had once stood. Many of these communities were founded only five or six generations ago, and already they are gone. In many places, the American plains are not suitable for sustained living by farmers or ranchers. The soil is too thin and the water is too scarce. The famous Oglala Aquifer is drying up at an alarming rate.
“O, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.” What would it feel like to have lived your entire life in a hamlet on the plains, and now everyone is gone, and you, you only, are left? Wouldn’t it be great simply to fly away from it all?
Some glad morning, when this life is o’er,
I’ll fly away,
To a home on God’s celestial shore,
I’ll fly away.
I’ll fly away, O glory,
I’ll fly away,
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,
I’ll fly away.
Do you remember the movie The Trip to Bountiful? It starred Estelle Parsons as an elderly lady who wanted to go back to her birthplace, a little town in East Texas called Bountiful. Her son tried to convince her not to go, because he knew there was nothing there anymore, but she insisted. It was a bittersweet film, a happy reminiscence of days gone by, and a sad reflection of days right now. Once she had seen what was – and was no longer – Bountiful, she was ready to fly away back to Dallas to her son’s and daughter-in-law’s home, there to die in peace.
Richard III had one of the shortest and most unhappy reigns of all the English monarchs. He is the one who, in Shakespeare’s play of that name, begins with the famous opening lines, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.” And at the end of the play, when Richard is in mortal combat with his Lancastrian enemies in the War of the Roses, his horse is shot out from under him, and he is left defenseless on the battlefield. “A horse! A horse!” he cries, “My kingdom for a horse!” … The archers close in on him.
Shakespeare depicts Richard III as a misshapen very unhappy man: “Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/ Into this breathing world, scarce half made up/ And that so lamely and unfashionable/ That dogs bark at me as I halt them.” A body has been found under a parking lot in central England. The skeleton has a curvature of the spine, and there is a metal arrow in its back and a crushed skull, and archaeologists wonder whether the body of a fallen king may have been found in a very unlikely resting place. “O that I had wings like a dove!” Given fight or flight, we know what that unfortunate monarch would have chosen. But a choice was not given to him, and he perished in the fight.
Some of you have very hard rows to hoe. You didn’t ask for it; it just worked out like that. And it keeps going on, week after week, month after month, year after year. “O that I had wings like a dove!”
Your best answer, perhaps your only answer, is the answer David found. “But I call upon God; and the Lord will save me” (Psalm 55:16). God is there. Precisely because your situation is so hard, particularly is God there. God is wherever the going is the hardest, and the road is the steepest. When flight trumps fight for you, God is the most present in your life. When you think you can’t take it another minute, He enters most fully into your troubled existence.
Sail on, Silver Girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on the way
See how they shine
If you need a friend
I’m sailing right behind
Like a bridge over trouble water
I will ease your mind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind.
Allow Him to do that.